Movie City Indie Archive for August, 2005

Watch the trailer for George Clooney‘s Good Night, And Good Luck., a portrait of 1950s journalists Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly of CBS-TV, as they dissected the smears of alcoholic, serial fabricator Congressman Joe McCarthy. If the movie crackles half this much…

The Constant Gardener, a melancholy romance and thriller set in contemporary Africa opens today; Andrew Niccol’s heady satire of gunrunning on that continent, Lord of War opens in September, but still the most haunting piece of work about commerce in Africa this year, Darwin’s Nightmare, is terrifying nonfiction, a movie I’ve tried to shake but can’t. In The Age, Philippa Hawker visits with filmmaker Hubert Sauper as the movie makes its Antipodean debut. “People know that there is a crisis in Africa, [he] says. They don’t need to be told – at least, not in those terms. “If all they see is some specialist saying that Africa is starving, viewers will fall asleep.” But… his new [Tanzania-set] documentary, won’t let its viewers slumber: it’s a haunting, devastating film, a provocation and, in its own way, a revelation. It is the story of a predatory fish and its place in a system that consumes rather than sustains – but, says Austrian-born Sauper, it could equally have been about coffee, or bananas, or oil. The fish, however, is a particularly potent metaphor. At Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical lake, a few Nile perch were added to the fish population in the 1960s. Gradually, the carnivorous creature with huge jaws took over, killing other species. These predators had a similarly destructive effect beyond the lake, as Sauper shows.” The director, Hawker describes, stays close to the figures involved in the trade, working without voiceover and the distancing of “expert” testimony. “What he shows is simple, but also horribly complicated. It’s a film about people and consequences…. And, while it deals with terrible realities, it’s a film without either scapegoats or saviours, heroes or villains. Sauper isn’t interested in those kinds of definitions. “When I select my characters, I ask myself: do I like this person? Do I want to spend a part of my life with them?” … It’s also too easy to find a nice guy trying to make a difference. “There’s a tendency in American documentaries to do this, and it’s bullshit. It makes you comfortable, instead of aware.” [More of Sauper’s terrible truths at the link.]

The Reporter reports on Katrina’s effect on Louisiana production, a reminder of why, historically, filmmakers hied west to California: consistent weather. “Louisiana, which has been aggressively courting film productions, was hosting at least 3 TV and film shoots in the state as the monster storm, which had threatened to hit land as a fearsome Category 5, approached. The Governor’s Office of Film and Television — located in Harahan, outside of New Orleans — was not answering calls Monday. When New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation over the weekend, Element Films suspended production on its comedy The Last Time,”starring Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser, and immediately left… A Warners spokesperson said The Reaping hopes to return to New Orleans on Wednesday and resume filming Thursday, even though the production suffered what was said to be minor set damage. But that may prove challenging because, as one source on the production said, “Flights, electricity, manpower, car rental — there are going to be massive infrastructure problems.” [New Orleans-based filmmaker David Gordon Green reportedly has relocated to Austin for the duration.]

From Mumbai, New Kerala’s Nitin Sethi reports on Mr. Malick’s new one, Tree of Life. India’s Percept Picture Company would executive produce with a January start, and Colin Farrell starring with “2 major Hollywood stars in the leads.” Working from Malick’s script, it would be shot by Emmanual Lubezki.”

The lowest-rated of 60 cable channels tracked by Neilsen, a music video channel called Fuse, may be getting eyed by the Weinsteins, reports Broadcasting & Cable. “Ex-Miramax Pictures chiefs Harvey and Bob Weinstein may reach their goal of getting into the cable television business by [trying to buy] Fuse. The brothers are reportedly in talks with [business partner] Cablevision about purchasing the channel and [shifting] �the programming into a mix of “lifestyle” shows and movies, aimed at a more broad audience� than the 18-34 demographic Fuse targets… The network could probably be had for about $450 million.”

Pedro Almodovar is keeping a chatty diary on the making of his new movie, Volver, with pics: “These are all spontaneous and spur-of-the moment photos taken while we prepared to film. They are like a domestic “making of”, without any pretensions. Next time we’ll have photos of the actual shooting. I’ll take them myself since, in case you haven’t noticed, this is all part of a haphazard and not particularly orderly director’s diary.”

Ed Blank of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a local playwright fill in Tom Tykwer’s projects: Former Pittsburgher Thom Thomas, a veteran of the Pittburgh Civic Light Opera reports that he and Tykwer will collaborate on 2NDS, which the writer self-describes as “a quite ingenious thriller about twins.” Two years ago, he wrote a screenplay of Paul Auster’s novel, “Mr. Vertigo,” which the producers dangled at Tykwer. Relates the chatty playwright: “Earlier this year Tom called and said he’d be in L.A. and wanted to meet with me. I assumed it was about the same script. But instead he said there was a different script — one he had written but that he said wasn’t jelling at all. I read it and told him what I thought was wrong with it, and he suggested we co-write it.” Of another project, the writer says it went through 3 directors and three casts, but, as Blank relates, “The producer pulled out, and then he died.” Meanwhile, Thomas’ latest play, “A Moon to Dance By” world preemed at Indiana’s New Harmony Theatre.

Crain’s New York Business offers an indie slump stats piece, to line up with all the other “slump” journalism: “Over the last 12 months there have only been a very, very small number of films that we’ve been excited about,” says Ted Mundorff, VP of film and head film buyer at the art house chain Landmark Theatres, where box-office grosses this summer are down 10%… “We keep turning over more and more films hoping they’ll catch on, but they don’t.” … Still, industry insiders insist that the summer won’t be a total flop. IFC Films’ Me and You and Everyone We Know was made for under $1 million and is expected to gross close to $5 million. In August, ThinkFilm’s The Aristocrats, a documentary about a dirty joke, raked in $100,000 its first weekend at just one theater.”

Online viewing tip: New York photographer-illustrator Jorge Colombo continues his experimental shorts with a sweet, simple study-in-motion Meghan, Thursday. Most of Colombo’s films are shot with a digital stills camera, and run precisely one minute with looped soundtracks made with GarageBand.

Yet another report on the winding road John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus has taken to exposing a foot of film. One of the performers remarks, “Most people get self-conscious being naked in front of other people, but we’re really concerned with the story, what’s going on within these characters… The fact that we’re naked having sex in front of each other, it’s just a variable that’s very easy to deal with. It wasn’t so easy for potential financial backers to deal with, though. Mitchell says he initially approached about 50 to 60 investors, with little luck. Even envelope-pushing HBO, which filmed parts of the audition process, eventually backed away from the project. “Regular financing companies were scared because they have parent companies… A lot of investors said they were interested, but they didn’t trust their guts.”

In LA Weekly, Brendan Bernhard profiles LA novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, who talks about his new book, “Lunar Park,” and jokes about writers’ vanity: “I remember I was talking to my assistant pretty much every other day from L.A…. And he’d gotten a galley of the book, so I asked him, ‘So what do you think?’ He’d started it, and he sent me some e-mails saying, ‘I’m loving this book. I think it’s your best book, I really love it.’ And then the e-mails stopped. And we had a couple of conversations, and he didn’t bring the book up anymore. And I said, ‘Lookit, Cole, what’s going on? Did you like the book or not?’ And he said, ‘I really loved it up to a certain point, and then I thought it began to totally fall apart, and then it came in for a save at the end and it kind of all worked.’ And then I got furious, and I said, ‘I don’t pay you for your f-cking opinions. Shut up! Why did you tell me that? You’re fired!’ ”

War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman‘s blog, “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” is quickly becoming the Rude Pundit of screenwriter’s journals. The swears come furiously, especially in the memorable “Snakes on a Motherf-king Plane.” From Wednesday: “If any of you have checked me out on IMDB you’ll note that I wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay to Keanu Reeves’s most famous movie Chain Reaction. I’ve only got a shared story credit now but it began as a spec script sold by yours truly some months after making his first $20,000 on the previously discussed serial killer movie. I got paid pretty well but I was still living in the attic and driving my mother’s Honda. In the future I’ll write about selling this script but all you need to know right now is this: There is ONE line in the movie left over from my spec. “I’m your friend, Eddie.” [More of Friedman’s backstory, plus swears, at the link.]

Fernando Meirelles doesn’t seem to give the same interview twice; Larry Gross parlays the nous from LA Weekly: “I like films that you have to work with while you are watching them, that demand an active audience, like Memento or 21 Grams or Last Year at Marienbad. Actually, organizing things in a chronological order is just one way to organize things. I can also organize according to colors, numbers, emotions. I mean there’s so many ways to organize things, why do you have to put them in chronological order?”

In the Sun-Times “The New Downtown” series, Roger Ebert recalls past glories: “Just for the sake of nostalgia, let me name the theaters I remember: the Chicago, State-Lake, Oriental, Roosevelt, United Artists, Woods, McVickers, Clark, Monroe, Michael Todd, Cinestage, World Playhouse, Loop, Bismarck Palace and, oh, a place called the Shangri-La that materialized out of a Chinese restaurant, showed some porn and disappeared.” [Optimism at the link.]

“Film festivals, for those who don’t know, are not exactly the glitzy red carpet affairs you see on TV. Those do happen, but they’re a tiny part of the festival. The main part of any film festival are the thousands of people with festival passes hanging on lanyards beneath their anoraks, carrying brochures for movies you have never and will never hear of, desperately scrabbling to sell whatever movie it is to buyers from all over the world. Every hotel bar, every cafe, every restaurant is filled to the brim with these people, talking loudly about non-existent deals. The Brits are the worst because most of the British film industry, with a few honourable exceptions, are scam artists and chancers who move around from company to company failing to get anything good made and trying to cast Danny Dyer in anything that moves. I’m seeing guys here who I first met twenty years ago and who are still wearing the same clothes, doing the same job (albeit for a different company) and spinning the same line of bullshit about how THIS movie has Al Pacino or Meryl Streep or George Clooney attached and, whilst that last one didn’t work out, THIS ONE is going to be HUGE. As the day goes on, they start drinking and it all gets ugly and, well, that’s why I’m the guy walking through the Tiergarten with a camera taking pictures of frozen lakes and pretending this isn’t happening.

“Berlin is cool, though and I’ve been lucky to be doing meetings with some people who want to actually get things done. We’ll see what comes of it.”
~ Julian Simpson

“The difference between poetry and prose, and why if you’re not acculturated to poetry, you might resist it: that page is frightening. Why is it not filled? The two categories of people who don’t feel that way are children and prisoners. So many prison poets; they see that gap and experience it differently. I’m for the gap!”
~ Poet Eileen Myles